dd sense of having been caught up into the crowd as
carelessly as a passenger is gathered in by an express train. The blonde
and genial Mrs. Gormer might, indeed, have figured the conductor, calmly
assigning seats to the rush of travellers, while Carry Fisher represented
the porter pushing their bags into place, giving them their numbers for
the dining-car, and warning them when their station was at hand. The
train, meanwhile, had scarcely slackened speed--life whizzed on with a
deafening' rattle and roar, in which one traveller at least found a
welcome refuge from the sound of her own thoughts. The Gormer MILIEU
represented a social out-skirt which Lily had always fastidiously
avoided; but it struck her, now that she was in it, as only a flamboyant
copy of her own world, a caricature approximating the real thing as the
"society play" approaches the manners of the drawing-room. The people
about her were doing the same things as the Trenors, the Van Osburghs and
the Dorsets: the difference lay in a hundred shades of aspect and manner,
from the pattern of the men's waistcoats to the inflexion of the women's
voices. Everything was pitched in a higher key, and there was more of
each thing: more noise, more colour, more champagne, more
familiarity--but also greater good-nature, less rivalry, and a fresher
capacity for enjoyment.

Miss Bart's arrival had been welcomed with an uncritical friendliness
that first irritated her pride and then brought her to a sharp sense of
her own situation--of the place in life which, for the moment, she must
accept and make the best of. These people knew her story--of that her
first long talk with Carry Fisher had left no doubt: she was publicly
branded as the heroine of a "queer" episode--but instead of shrinking
from her as her own friends had done, they received her without question
into the easy promiscuity of their lives. They swallowed her past as
easily as they did Miss Anstell's, and with no apparent sense of any
difference in the size of the mouthful: all they asked was that she
should--in her own way, for they recognized a diversity of
gifts--contribute as much to the general amusement as that graceful
actress, whose talents, when off the stage, were of the most varied
order. Lily felt at once that any tendency to be "stuck-up," to mark a
sense of differences and distinctions, would be fatal to her continuance
in the Gormer set. To be taken in on such terms--and into such a
world!-